Solo: A Star Wars Story has mustered only $264 million at the worldwide box office, but one prominent voice on Wall Street blames the misfire on “poor marketing,” not a larger issue wit…

Even so, he writes that the film’s struggle “has occasioned some concern that audiences may be suffering from ‘Star Wars’ fatigue. We think this is probably not the case, and that Solo’s biggest problem was an uncharacteristically (for Disney) poor marketing campaign.”

Summoning a notable degree of fan acumen, he argues that the marketing for Solo failed to persuasively sell Alden Ehrenreich as a young Han Solo, a character originated onscreen more than 40 years ago by Harrison Ford. By contrast, Creutz pointed to the first teaser for Rogue One, which came out 247 days before the movie. (But who’s counting? Creutz, apparently.) “The first 35 seconds of the trailer almost exclusively focuses on Felicity Jones as the protagonist Jyn Erso, selling her as a new franchise hero,” he writes. “The second half is dominated by the Imperial alert klaxon and Forest Whitaker’s voice over, and practically screams ‘EPIC’ at the viewer, before closing on another hero shot of Jones.” The first teaser for Solo, he noted, came out just 108 days out from release. The teaser, by our count, only had about 10 seconds of screen time where Ehrenreich’s face was clearly in the picture — not, in our opinion, nearly enough.”

The great irony with the legacy of The Matrix was that Revolutions has the climactic fight between Neo and Smith that everyone said was what a proper Superman movie ought to look like. A big part of why Superman Returns ended up being rejected was because it didn’t have something like that in it. And a large part of why Man of Steel was rejected was because it did…

What the hell is franchise fatigue precisely? When has there been a case of franchise fatigue? If the movie is entertaining - or looks entertaining - people are going to see it. I think the article makes a good point that really franchise fatigue, if it exists, lies with the marketing and promotion. If you can’t drum up interest in your product, maybe it’s because you’re tired of it, not that the potential audience and fans who saw the last film were.

Franchise fatigue is the term for when fans think their criticisms are valid but are really just symptomatic of their having moved on to something else without realizing they have. So they’re criticizing mostly because they’re no longer interested but can’t stop watching (or reading, or listening).

Or, if you don’t want to criticize fans, it’s simply producing more material than the market can reasonably absorb.

That idea of franchise fatigue makes sense. That the life of the franchise has just run its course, like the Spider-Man, Star Trek and Transformers movies.

But the articles lately don’t define it that way. If Solo had that sort of Franchise Fatigue, then it would mean that people just don’t want to see Star Wars movies anymore. The idea that people are worn out because movies in a franchise are too close together just doesn’t make sense. Suggesting that they just needed to wait until next year to release the movie or something. If anything, today, people want the next film as soon as possible and franchise fatigue sets in when there is too long a wait. Hell, if the next Avengers movie came out this weekend, it would make more than the last one. This is because interest is hot.

In this instance, it’s fatigue from expecting every new Star Wars project to atone for the prequels, and since Last Jedi to atone for any perceived missteps. For a lot of fans, originally, Force Awakens atoned for the prequels. But then Rogue One sort of replaces it in that regard, and gave them that crucial original “cool moment” with Vader’s stampede. Star Wars fans ultimately don’t seem to want a ton of movies to satiate them. So in that sense it really is fatigue. Every new movie is another chance to ruin their previous memories, for them, not a chance to build up new ones. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual material.

I can see a case made for Solo being poorly marketed. It took them forever to get the trailer out; it should have been attached to TLJ.

And even then, in the trailers, they played it kind of coy with Ehrenreich, like they were trying not to show too much of him. Which was, maybe, because they wanted to save most of his performance for the theaters, but it could also come off like they were hiding him because he sucked.

I don’t think it was necessarily undermarketed, though, because I think I saw more advertising for this than I did Infinity War, and definitely more than Deadpool 2.

What the hell is franchise fatigue precisely? When has there been a case of franchise fatigue?

Franchise fatigue is when you start to see diminishing returns. Either the franchise has over-extended itself, the audience has gotten bored, the quality has slipped, or the concept has played out. Usually a combination of two or more of these.

Examples include:

The Transformers films. They’re up to, what, six now? There’s a sameness about all of them and the novelty has worn off.

The X-Files. Big for a while, but the story never went anywhere and the leads abandoned the series. By the later seasons it had crawled up its own ass.

Star Trek in the late 90s. Two concurrent series, DS9 and VOY, and a series of TNG movies. DS9 and VOY sort of split the fanbase, and the TNG films were, with one exception, of dubious merit. Combine this with too much merch, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

X-Men comics. Too many titles, too many characters, too many retcons and plot twists, and too much Wolverine. Marvel’s crown jewel for decades found itself taking a backseat to the Avengers.

That might a British bias - in no way does Potter eclipse Marvel in any measurable way in the states. Both of course are terribly popular and have legions of fans, but Marvel movies audience has been twice what Potter was and Marvel movies are on TV almost nightly.

Pottermania has definitely cooled off, but it was huge for a while. While there were still books coming out, every kid in America (and many adults, too) was poring over those books like they were religious texts. Kids were cosplaying, going to midnight release parties at book stores, and otherwise completely absorbed in that world. At its peak it was bigger than Marvel and, probably, bigger than Star Wars in the OT days.

The MCU is very popular, but I don’t pick up that intense interest that Harry Potter and Star Wars had. Maybe that’s good for the franchise because it won’t burn out as quickly.

The midnight release party thing probably owed a lot to the famous camping-out-for-The Phantom Menace thing that happened. I’m sure people had done that before, but the scale of it had shifted. No one camps out for things like that anymore.

At its peak it was bigger than Marvel and, probably, bigger than Star Wars in the OT days.

I know this is all opinion and subjective but looking at the box office, the longevity, the toy presence, the spin offs, the endless niche merchandise - I just see Marvel as bigger. Maybe the lines blur between Marvel and MCU, but there’s 19 movies compared to 8, and 4 movies a year compared to one every 2 years. At its peak there’s no way Potter could have got away with 4 movies in a year. Disney would be all over a Marvel theme park if other theme parks hadn’t encroached that space already.

As wide as its success has been MCU still trails Star Wars in overall impact, and it’s still way too early to begin talking legacy. I guarantee there’s no prequels or sequels decades in the future to these movies. They’ll be total reinventions, and that’s really where the comparisons begin. And there will be no comparison. This is a unique moment in time, for the Avengers. Star Wars has been here a long time, and will continue to inspire new work for years to come. We’ve already seen Harry Potter begin that journey, and LOTR had the Hobbit movies. By that standard, it’s Star Wars, LOTR (arguably), Harry Potter, and then MCU.

Just to nitpick, there are 9 Potterverse movies with a 10th on the way. From a movie standpoint Marvel might edge out Potter. Potter’s major influence and impact was in the book world. It that sense it was a cultural phenomenon like no other. The movies were big, but the real Potter love lies with the books. Where are Marvel books are still nerdy, the Marvel love is in the movies with the vast majority.